Friday, January 01, 2010

Treadmill Experiments

Happy New Year

Spent a couple of hours at the gym and surprisingly I recognized at lot of of the people there. Guess it's going to take a little while for the New Year's Resolution Crowd to get here.

I've been ill for the past few days so it was really nice to get out and moving. First did my favorite: RPM which is a stationary bike class and is an invitation to try to kill yourself while cool music plays and a super nice, super fit instructor encourages you in this pursuit. It is in RPM where I have hit my Maximum Heart Rate twice (this is hard to do - once), and one time I went past what I thought was my MHR which made me dubious enough that I replaced the heart rate monitor as it was acting slightly erratically. Fortunately since I'm coming off of a cold I just cruised. Rediscovering my actual MHR will be for another day.

After class I was pretty revved so I jumped on a treadmill and wasn't winding down at all so I just kept going and wound up staying on the treadmill an hour, so I took the time to verify something that I'd been suspecting.

At a rate of 3mph
At an incline of 5.0 (5 degrees maybe?), the calorie burn rate is 383/hr
At an incline of 10.0 the calorie burn rate leaps up to 529/hr!

This means that going uphill is just as calorically effective as jogging! Maybe not as fun when you're on a treadmill, but nice to have that alternative.

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